The showpiece attractions of any Olympic Games are the venues where feats of sporting brilliance take place. It is these arenas that provide the stages, the names of which echo throughout history as readily as the athletes who graced them. Often, but not exclusively, the preserve of the Games' flagship athletics competition, the "main" stadium at a Games can be legacy-defining in terms of architecture as well as scope. The Gabba will no longer join the exulted list of venues to have been considered an Olympic Games' main stadium. Instead, a brand new, 63,000-capacity venue will be built in Victoria Park — the first new-build main Olympic stadium since London 2012 (although that is slightly disingenuous as Tokyo's 2020 stadium involved the rebuild of the entire existing stadium). So much about the new stadium remains unknown — including its cost (the 100-day review estimated $3.785 billion) and design. But from what we do know, how will it stack up against some of its predecessors? The bigger the better? Perhaps not With a proposed capacity of 63,000, the Victoria Park stadium would become the third-largest stadium in the country behind Australia's two existing Olympic stadiums, the MCG (100,024) and the Sydney Olympic stadium (82,000). During the 2000 Games, Sydney's Olympic stadium could contain 110,000 (although 114,714 watched the closing ceremony), making it the largest Olympic stadium ever. The capacity of the MCG during the 1956 Olympics was 103,000, making it the third-largest Olympic stadium ever behind Sydney and Berlin's magnificent neoclassical Olympiastadion (110,000). When compared just to those behemoths, the proposed Victoria Park stadium seems relatively small. And there is a case for that — its relatively modest size would make Victoria Park the smallest main stadium for an Olympic Games since Amsterdam's 1926 Olympisch Stadion, which held just 31,600. But in actual fact, the capacity is actually in line with what a lot of Olympic stadiums tend to pitch themselves at. Indeed, Brisbane does not need a stadium any larger than this and to blow out the capacity would risk turning the arena into the palest of white elephants. Brisbane is, after all, the smallest city by population to host a Summer Olympic Games since Helsinki in 1952. The proposed capacity of 63,000 was not a wild stab in the dark, either. The 100-day report by the Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority (GIICA) noted that Queensland had the lowest provision of major sporting stadium seating capacity of the five most populous states compared to population, at 60 people per seat. Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia have an average of 36 people per seat. Being a bit smaller than the nations' other Olympic stadiums may make the Victoria Park stadium an anomaly domestically, but in fact it's very much in keeping with what we'd expect. What about the pool? The proposed new Aquatic Centre at the site of the current Centenary Pool however, is going to be mighty big. With a proposed Games capacity of 25,000 — which will be reduced to a permanent seated capacity of 8,800 — the venue would be the third-largest to ever host swimming at a Games. And that would be fitting, in a country where swimmers are lauded like no other, with the possible exception of the United States. In Paris, the pool was the second-largest venue by capacity with 15,220 seats which, in keeping with its commitment to reusing existing stadiums, were housed inside the refitted Paris La Défense Arena. After the Games it returned to its normal use as a home ground for Top 14 rugby union club, Racing 92. Los Angeles will also go big with its swimming venue, but with even greater scope, using SoFi Stadium — the home ground of LA's two NFL teams, the Chargers and the Rams — to create the largest swimming pool-only venue in Olympic history at 38,000. Incidentally, it's not the largest ever — the 100m long pool for the 1908 Games was situated in the infield of the 93,000-capacity White City Stadium in London. The new National Aquatic Centre will be a statement venue for Australia's swimming future — Swimming Australia's chief executive Rob Woodhouse called it "the most significant investment ever in aquatic sports in Australia" that has the potential to set up the sport "for ongoing success for the next 50 years". But the statement could also be in its design. Beijing's Water Cube is one of the most staggering and distinctive pieces of sporting architecture in the world. London's Aquatic Centre and its undulating roof is the design vision of Zaha Hadid and remains a focal point for the whole Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park. Whoever ends up designing the finished product, they have a huge task on their hands. A blank, golden canvas You might expect that Olympics tend to build brand new stadiums at huge expense as a par for the course, but the trend overall is to make use of existing venues. Last year's Games in Paris, for example, had as its feature arena a ground that's actually older than the redevelopment of Brisbane's Lang Park, the 1998-built Stade de France. The 2021 Games took place in the same location as the 1964 Olympics — but the Japan National Stadium in Tokyo was completely rebuilt on the site of the old national stadium at a cost of 157 billion yen ($1.6 billion). The Rio Games too made use of a redeveloped existing stadium, the historic Maracanã for its opening and closing ceremonies, while the athletics was held at the smaller Estádio Nilton Santos, which was also an existing stadium. The LA Games will make history by using the same stadium, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, for the third time. It was also the main stadium in both 1932 and 1984. However, London (2012) and Beijing (2008) both built brand-new stadiums as their flagship feature pieces, as did Sydney (2000) and Atlanta (1996). Before that, 10 of the previous 12 Games, stretching from Barcelona 1992 to London 1948, all used pre-existing venues. The only exceptions were the Games in Munich and Montreal in the 1970s — both of which were architectural marvels, albeit with contrasting legacies. It took Montreal 30 years to pay off its revolutionary stadium, earning it the nickname The Big Owe and cementing Montreal as the poster child for the excesses and frivolity of the Olympic movement — its total overrun was estimated at over 700 per cent of its budget. Those Games were fraught with issues for the organisers. Many African nations boycotted the Games after the IOC refused to ban New Zealand after that year's All Black tour of South Africa went ahead in defiance of the Apartheid ban, while Canada became the first and only nation in history not to win a single gold medal at their own Olympics, winning just 11 overall. Given Australia's stunning record in the pool and elsewhere in Olympic Games, one thinks we'd be safe in assuming that a lack of gold medal success won't be an issue for Australia in Brisbane, certainly in the pool.